Download or read book The Red Thread written by Bernard Faure and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a Buddhist discourse on sex? In this innovative study, Bernard Faure reveals Buddhism's paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality. His remarkably broad range covers the entire geography of this religion, and its long evolution from the time of its founder, Xvkyamuni, to the premodern age. The author's anthropological approach uncovers the inherent discrepancies between the normative teachings of Buddhism and what its followers practice. Framing his discussion on some of the most prominent Western thinkers of sexuality--Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault--Faure draws from different reservoirs of writings, such as the orthodox and heterodox "doctrines" of Buddhism, and its monastic codes. Virtually untapped mythological as well as legal sources are also used. The dialectics inherent in Mahvyvna Buddhism, in particular in the Tantric and Chan/Zen traditions, seemed to allow for greater laxity and even encouraged breaking of taboos. Faure also offers a history of Buddhist monastic life, which has been buffeted by anticlerical attitudes, and by attempts to regulate sexual behavior from both within and beyond the monastery. In two chapters devoted to Buddhist homosexuality, he examines the way in which this sexual behavior was simultaneously condemned and idealized in medieval Japan. This book will appeal especially to those interested in the cultural history of Buddhism and in premodern Japanese culture. But the story of how one of the world's oldest religions has faced one of life's greatest problems makes fascinating reading for all.

Download or read book Japanese Demon Lore written by Noriko T. Reider and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings. Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reiderýs book is the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as "others" to the Japanese.

Download or read book Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan 1600 1900 written by Gerald Groemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

Download or read book Rethinking Japan Vol 1 written by Adriana Boscaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-27 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These papers explore the debate over new directions in Japanese studies.

Download or read book The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence written by Andrew R. Murphy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The timely Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who provide a coherent state of the art overview of the complex relationships between religion and violence. This companion tackles one of the most important topics in the field of Religion in the twenty-first century, pulling together a unique collection of cutting-edge work A focused collection of high-quality scholarship provides readers with a state-of-the-art account of the latest work in this field The contributors are broad-ranging, international, and interdisciplinary, and include historians, political scientists, religious studies scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, scholars of women's and gender studies and communication

Download or read book Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-05-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the first collection in English of feminist-oriented research on Japanese art and visual culture, an international group of scholars examines representations of women in a wide range of visual work. The volume begins with Chino Kaori's now-classic essay "Gender in Japanese Art," which introduced feminist theory to Japanese art. This is followed by a closer look at a famous thirteenth-century battle scroll and the production of bijin (beautiful women) prints within the world of Edo-period advertising. A rare homoerotic picture-book is used to extrapolate the "grammar of desire" as represented in late seventeenth-century Edo. In the modern period, contributors consider the introduction to Meiji Japan of the Western nude and oil-painting and examine Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and the role of one of its famous artists. The book then shifts its focus to an examination of paintings produced for the Japanese-sponsored annual salons held in colonial Korea. The postwar period comes under scrutiny in a study of the novel Woman in the Dunes and its film adaptation. The critical discourse that surrounded women artists of the late twentieth-century--the "Super Girls of Art"--is analyzed, followed by a consideration of gender ambiguity and cross-gender identification in contemporary anime and manga. Contributors: Grunhild Borggreen, Norman Bryson, Chino Kaori, Doris Croissant, Ikeda Shinobu, Kim Hye-shin, Chigusa Kimura-Steven, Joshua S. Mostow, Sharalyn Orbaugh, David Pollack.

Download or read book Catalogues of the Harvard Yenching Library Author written by Harvard-Yenching Library and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Japanese Visual Culture written by Mark W. MacWilliams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.

Download or read book Manga s Cultural Crossroads written by Jaqueline Berndt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the art and literary form of manga, this volume examines the intercultural exchanges that have shaped manga during the twentieth century and how manga’s culturalization is related to its globalization. Through contributions from leading scholars in the fields of comics and Japanese culture, it describes "manga culture" in two ways: as a fundamentally hybrid culture comprised of both subcultures and transcultures, and as an aesthetic culture which has eluded modernist notions of art, originality, and authorship. The latter is demonstrated in a special focus on the best-selling manga franchise, NARUTO.

Download or read book Library Catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York written by Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.). Library and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Guide to Writing Kanji Kana written by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and published by PeriplusEdition. This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Included under each entry are the Japanese and Chinese readings, stroke order, English meanings, sample compounds, radicals, and ample practice space.

Download or read book Textiles and lacquer written by Tōkyō Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Births and Rebirths in Japanese Art written by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and published by Hotei Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together five essays by prominent scholars of Japanese studies, each discussing a central topic in Japanese cultural history. Based on a series of lectures marking the inauguration of the Sainsbury Institute in Norwich and London, each essay introduces in concise and readable form subjects that the authors have worked on as part of larger publishing projects. The authors have distilled their views on aspects of their research that relate to an important artistic, cultural, or intellectual 'birth' or 'rebirth' in Japanese history. Contributors: Helmut Brinker, Tsuji Nobuo, Timon Screech, Donald Keene and John Rosenfield

Download or read book Survival Among The Kurds written by John S. Guest and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993. The Yezidis are a community of around 200,000 Kurds who possess their own religion, quite distinct from Islam, which most other Kurds profess, and from the Christian and Jewish faiths. The Yezidis live in the northern parts of Iraq and Syria, in eastern Turkey, in Germany and in the ex-Soviet republics of Armenia and Georgia. (In Armenia the Yezidis, long classified as Kurds, are now recognized as a separate minority group and the term 'Kurd' is applied only to Moslem Kurds.) This book stems from a conversation with the Yezidi priest of the village who remarked that now the children were learning to read and write they were asking him questions about the Yezidi scriptures and the history of the community. Lacking any written material, he could only repeat to them the oral traditions he had himself learned as a child.

Download or read book Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing written by J. Thomas Rimer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-time English translation of the Wakan roei shu includes insightful annotations after each passage and several explanatory essays.

Download or read book Taish Chic written by Kendall H. Brown and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of these works have never been published and several major paintings, exhibited in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s then lost after the war, are brought to light here for the first time in decades. This catalogue not only presents newly discovered works but also, in bringing together a broad range of objects representative of mainstream Taisho visual culture, reconstructs the styles popular from 1915 to 1935 in a celebration of Taisho Chic."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Society and the State in Interwar Japan written by Elise K. Tipton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social history of Japan between the First and Second World Wars is a neglected area of study. The contributors to this volume consider factors such as nationalism, class, gender and race. They also explore the ideas and activities of a number of new social and political groups, such as the urban white collar class (including middle class working women), socialists, industrial workers and emigrants. The book questions the myth of Japanese homogeneity, and gives an emphasis to the diversity, cross-currents and socio-political tensions that characterised the 1920s and 1930s.